Frankenstein at the Villa Diodati

In June 1816, the year without a summer, Lord Byron was renting the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, and his neighbours Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin, eighteen years old, came over most evenings. Kept indoors by storms, they read German ghost stories aloud, and Byron proposed that each of them write one. Mary's took longest. It began as a waking dream of a pale student kneeling beside the thing he had put together, and became Frankenstein. Twenty-eight days, one letter or chapter a day, from the anniversary of that wager.

Read one big book alongside other readers, a day at a time. Cohorts set off on the date above.